The Obama camp must be in melt down. Perhaps fearing that the MSM has now slowed in its efforts to villify Sarah Palin and drive her out of the race, they have taken up the slurs and slams directly. Howard Guttman, an original member of the Obama national finance committee, went on Laura Ingraham Friday to again and again infer that Palin’s parenting skills and the choice to run for VP were suspect. It is stunning actually. A sample:
Gutman said the issue wasn’t one of gender, but one of parenting -– regardless of the gender of the parent.
“This has nothing to do with gender, whether Todd Palin was the nominee or Sarah Palin was the nominee,” Gutman said. “If my daughter had just come home at 17 years old and said, ‘Mom, Dad, I’m pregnant, we have a family problem,’ I wouldn’t say, ‘You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to take this private family problem…and you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to go on the international stage and broadcast this to the world.'”
Gutman continued, “this wasn’t a working mother issue, this was a parent issue…The proper attack is not that a woman shouldn’t run for vice president with five kids, it’s that a parent, when they have a family in need, a Down’s baby who needs them — mother or father.”
“So you are judging her parenting skills,” Ingraham said. “You’re saying you don’t think she’s a good parent for doing this job.”
“I’m saying the proper criticism is not that it’s a woman or man – it doesn’t matter whether it’s Todd or Sarah,” Gutman said. “Think of how many politicians have said it’s not the right time in my family’s life for me to run.”
The Obama camp denied that this outburst represented their views. (If you believe that, I have some old Wesley Clark interviews to play for you.) And if Guttman really strayed entirely off message and his views violate the Obama directive to leave kids and family “out of it,” isn’t the correct response to give Guttman back his money? He can’t be fired because he is not, to my knowledge, working on the campaign. But the equivalent treatment would be to denounce him and separate the Obama campaign from his noxious views by returning his check(s).
One wonders what the Obama internal polling must be and what the chit-chat within the Obama camp must be to set off such blather and stupidity. Like the “hair trigger” response which greeted the original Palin announcement, one wonders if this latest episode suggests that Obama isn’t, after all, a great executive, but rather a mere figurehead unable to reign in his troops or provide them with guidance in troubling times. Imagine if the crisis were something other than a drop in his poll numbers.